


abhaile

by Kaiseriin



Category: Fargo (TV)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Behavior, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, LOTS of violence, Period-Typical Racism, i mean it's fargo
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:27:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27509086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kaiseriin/pseuds/Kaiseriin
Summary: “Got off the boat two months ago," I told him. "How about you? Where are you from?”“American,” he said. “Not Irish. Never came from nowhere.”⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕The Faddas hire an Irishwoman for a housekeeper and she takes her lodgings in the house; across the hall is another Irishman - even if he denies being one at all. • [RabbixOC] •
Relationships: Patrick 'Rabbi' Milligan/Original Female Character, Rabbi Milligan/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 30
Kudos: 23





	1. one

**Author's Note:**

> sooo...i am taking quite a risk by starting a story when the show hasn't finished yet. but look, having an irish character is a big deal for me on my favourite show - and a damn good actor plays him, so much so that i think he does a great job with the accent imo. so, some things to address before i post. 
> 
> obviously i gotta play around with history and i couldn't tell you if in the 1950s italian families would ever hire irish but hey, story has to happen somehow. someone out there would know american history/culture then in more detail. in addition the irish language would be in decline around this period too but rabbi at least understands it due to that first episode with his father. 
> 
> this chapter is my little introduction and i dont plan on the story being terribly long in terms of chapters either. but some backstory gets in and we'll expand on it and more rabbi!! always wanting more rabbi. again such a risk by posting this before we find out what happens to him...and if he turns out...to be the bad guy in any way...well...hahah...let's go!

abhaile

⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕

_then_

Rain had pooled in the potholes that dotted the dirt-road and turned the soil to sludge. From the kitchen, I watched Lynch slip through the gap in our cobbled walls where a gate should have been, his tall frame wandering toward the door. He shrugged his cap from his head and smoothing his black hair before he tapped thrice. I brought him into the house and put bread on the table for him, placed milk and cloth alongside the plate for him, too.

It had been a month since he had last been here and Lynch asked if I had read that novel which had been in my hands the last time that I had seen him, before he had handed my father a letter and left through the woodlands behind the house, across the creak. It had not been much of a novel at all and rather described the birds which could be found in the woodlands where Lynch himself had walked. I could tell the call of a wren and thrush and sparrow. I could tell what darting flash of faint yellow meant siskin or warbler; my father had taught me their calls and said there was something in powerful in knowing what nature was telling us through birdsong.

In the cottage, there was little space.

From where I sat with Lynch in the kitchen, I could hear the sound of water splashed and understood that my father was washing his face, pulling up his suspenders, preparing himself. Lynch tore chunks from the bread and rolled each strip into a ball, plopping it in his mouth and chewing, his jaw clicking. He spoke politely to me and I remembered nothing that he said apart from asking about that novel that had not been a novel after all.

I sat across from him and felt blood slosh against my eardrums, because there was no letter in his hand, this time around.

Stepping into the doorway, my father somehow seemed different. It was something drawn out in the long, hollow slant of his cheeks. He looked about the world like it wearied him and he clucked his tongue to summon me. I slid from my chair and walked across the room to him, which was nothing more than four short strides.

He tilted his head toward the bedroom where James slept between fitful, shuddering rasps, his face contorted, his lips mouthing words unheard. There was a small stool alongside his bed where my mother often sat. But she, too, went into the kitchen and settled beside my father to speak with Lynch and it was already bad, no letter in his hand, blood sloshing against my eardrums, James rasping and mouthing and shuddering.

Carefully, I shuffled the stool against the door and left it ajar, leaned toward it, listening. I glanced at James, whose skin had marbled beneath the greyish light cast between the hills beyond the house. The wooden frame of his bed creaked against the cobbled ground coated in sawdust and hay; the heady scent smothered me, bundled me in its sudden familiarity, so that I never wanted a house without sawdust and hay speckled across its flooring.

Through the narrow slit of the door, I heard Lynch speak in his droning manner, dragging out his words so slowly. “How’s the boy?”

“The Englishman sent you up that hill without even a cart to bring you through the mud,” my father said. “But up the hill you came for him, anyway. Does it not choke you, Martin, his boot pressed on your throat?”

“None of that, Michael.” Lynch cleared his throat. His chair ground against the tiles. “Mr. Abbott has been patient with ye. Allowed another month. What more can ye ask of him?”

“No work to be had, out here, nothin’ but farmland and when the soil brings you nothin’ but rot for a harvest, nothin’ can be done. Nowhere but in Dublin can work be found. The boy needs to stay here. Tell your Englishman to come talk to me himself. He sends ye out, his lackeys, while he stays snug in his own manor.”

“Abbott lives in no manor,” Lynch replied steadily. “Lives in a house, all right, and a grand one, too. There are new things goin’ on in the world than what you would know from livin’ in this village, too. D’you resent me for goin’ out and findin’ somethin’ better than farmin’ when the weather spoils the crop? Times are changin’; I change with ‘em.”

“No shame in this work –…”

“No shame in mine either. Only shame if you make it shameful.” There was a scratch, a sudden flicker of orange from between the black slit in the doorway. Lynch had lit himself a cigarette and its sizzling yellow end wavered in the inkiness of the doorway, so that I could follow its tip and find his mouth in all that shadowy fear bubbling up between the tiles within the kitchen, turning it black and sour in there. “Look, we’ve known each other years. Haven’t we? But you knew when you first took this cottage that you’d never own it. It _belongs_ to Abbott. All he wants is you to pay for it, for what you owe. We all have to pay what’s owed.”

“I toil on that land.” Something that I had never heard from my father before was that faint quiver that made him seem childlike; nothing about my father had ever been childlike. “I take myself out at dawn every day and I toil on that land – animals fed because of me, fields ploughed because of me, crops turned because of me, all of it because of _me_. You’re tellin’ me that Abbott can throw me off what’s always been mine? My father toiled here before me, his father before him –…”

“Doesn’t matter what your father did, matters less what his father did before him,” Lynch said. “Because here you are, today, in this room with me, and you owe your dues the same way I owe mine and every man livin’ in this world owes his. I’ll be goin’ back to Abbott tonight. He’ll want ye out by the end of the week. I’m sorry.”

“Your father worked with mine.” There was a pause. “He had the same soil on his hands that sticks to your boots, now. Soil that he made into somethin’ solid, somethin’ for his family. Somethin’ that can’t be taken.”

“I already told you. I won’t be tellin’ you again. It’s not me wantin’ to kick ye out of the house, Michael. It’s nothin’ personal. Nothin’ to do either with our fathers, our mothers. It’s what’s happenin’ here and now, between us. You’re not hearin’ me. Men like you never hear me.”

Scraping against the tiles, my father’s chair let out the scream which seemed muted and trapped in his own throat. I scooted my stool forward and saw my father through the doorway, his face foreign in its drained pallor, the sockets lined in purple and his mouth coiled viciously. He breathed through flecks of spittle and stood from the table. He cut through the kitchen and into the garden through the back-door.

Lynch blew a ring of smoke. He nodded at my mother, who had not risen from her chair and who seemed unaware of him; her lips mouthed words, unheard. I trailed out from the bedroom, following behind Lynch who ducked his head beneath the rounded front-door of the cottage. His boots stuck against the mud, his grey cap caught whitish speckles of mist that fluttered downward from bleached clouds, their fluffed edges blending into the hills, so that there was no telling them apart from one another.

He was halfway down the winding mud-path that had formed in the wispy tufts of grass around our cottage, not yet swallowed in the onslaught of mud. Our cottage was angled on a slope that would take him down along a dirt-road, toward the old village with its cobbled houses like ours, its meagre church, its two shops; one of which was shuttered and had been for almost a decade. He was almost at the gap where a gate should have been, tipping his cap low against the drizzling rain.

Behind me, there was a wet clap of boots against tiles and the crash of furniture thrown aside. I heard calls from my mother, frantic swells of sound from her throat now open and pushing out those horrid screams, slapping madly at my father whose silhouette cut through the bleaker tones of the cottage and emerged on the threshold. He held a rifle and cocked it at Lynch.

He called out his name and his hoarse shout shivered down the garden to reach Lynch.

Lynch lifted his head and stared up across the muddy field that made our front-garden and saw me, stood in the mud, beside the doorway. Then his eyes drifted to the doorway itself. His death was held within that barrel and it forced his hand to his belt, ripping out a pistol of his own that shone in one dulled glint of silver.

My father thundered toward him, slipping in the mud and I slipped with him, running after him, reaching out to knock the rifle sideways, the rifle meant for shooting rabbits and not men. I was batting at him, pleading with him, not at all aware of what came from my mouth but saying it all the same and the soil swelled around my shoes to hold me in place, the soil that had belonged to him and his father before that and his father before that and his –…

There was a brutish cracking sound in my eardrum. There was a separation of white clouds and white hills.

Both men dropped against the mud; two blunt thumps against the ground and it was finished.

⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕

_now_

Framed alongside the bookshelves was a painting of the Virgin Mary. Her pale eyes were cast downward toward the ashtrays that littered the table, which itself was hidden behind sprawling papers and towering stacks of books. The room was stuffy, smothered in the sunlight that had become trapped between the windowpanes, the sheer curtains draped atop one another in dense folds. Clouds of smoke rolled toward me from the puckered lips of the Italian on my right, his tall frame slouched in his chair with legs crossed, one polished leather shoe bobbing while he hummed to himself.

Behind us sat another Italian who leafed through a newspaper and made small noises of disapproval, the paper crinkling loudly in his hands, unaware of how much it irked the Italian with the cigarette between his lips so that his humming quietened and he half-turned in his chair to glare. He spat at him in Italian, a harsh roll of words that made the man with the newspaper sheepishly fold it and plop it beside him.

Sinking back into his chair, the Italian with the cigarette glanced at me. “Irish, right?”

“Yes.”

The room fell into that strange muteness again. I blew out my cheeks and looked at the clock overhead the bookshelves. It ticked toward three-thirty. I had been here for forty minutes.

The seconds cracked against my skull. I wanted nothing more than to step out onto that porch of theirs, even with all those Italian men standing around, cradling cigarettes of their own. I wanted nothing more than to gulp down that brittle cold air that came from the first touch of winter in Missouri.

I found myself staring at that painting of the Virgin Mary again, a blank film washing over my eyes. I remembered the phone-call that I had gotten a week ago from Nell, standing in my nightgown and a flimsy robe with the phone cradled against my ear to hear her. Nell said she had made it to Ohio and had begun working for a family called Moreno – _Italian_ , she said, _and there are plenty more of ‘em, too_ , _‘specially in your neck of the woods_.

She had heard about a family in Kansas City that wanted one, too; their last housekeeper, a German girl, had gotten knocked up by an Italian who then denied even knowing her. She was given a suitcase in one hand and a ticket to the next town in the other. Nell had taken her bed that same night. It went like that in America, or so Nell liked to tell me.

 _Americans have gotten so used to this newfound habit of buyin’ whatever they want, whenever they want_ , Nell said, _that they’ve started doin’ the same thing with the people who work for them. Out with the old, in with the new_.

I just happened to be brand-spanking new and more than willing to fill the bed of any girl who came before me.

“The Fadda family don’t want to take in a black housekeeper,” she told me. “And they sure as Hell don’t want Poles or Slovaks – if you even _suggest_ it, they’ll spit on the ground. But they’ll take Irish, not because they like us all that much but because we don’t ask for much and we fear God even more than they do.”

Then came heavy footsteps in the hall and the Italian ground his cigarette into the closest ashtray, smoothing down his shirt soon afterward and standing from his chair. I forgot all about Nell and her little speech about what Italians did and did not like, because the first Italian stood and the other Italian did the same and I jolted upward like a shock had crackled through me, setting me alight.

I felt stupid and small and more aware of myself at the entrance of Donatello Fadda whose broad figure was smothered in a rich coat and the brim of his hat drew dark shadows across his face, shrouding his expression from me. He was not a particularly tall man, but he held himself like one.

Behind him were the other Italian men who had crowded around the porch and watched me earlier, trailing up the garden with what seemed like lead in my shoes to make each step sluggish and awkward. I needed the housekeeping job and that had been the sole reason that I had pushed myself forward despite the numbness in my legs slowing me down.

In my flat, I had nothing but a handful of canned peaches in the cupboard and a packet of stale biscuits alongside them. There was no heat from the radiators either, radiators which had not been bled in months and which made an awful racket that frightened me enough to think they might simply explode if I pushed them too hard.

Once Donatella Fadda was safely in the room, the men disappeared down the hall and the door was drawn shut.

“Mr Fadda,” I said politely.

He shrugged off his coat, tore off his hat. “What is your name?”

“Ava McCarthy.” I noticed the Italian beside me shift and bob his shoe again. I added a quick, “Sir.”

“McCarthy,” he repeated, his thick accent clicking hardest against the second syllable. “You are Catholic?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you attend church?”

“Every Sunday.”

Donatello Fadda strode around the large mahogany table and slid into his seat. The two Italian men followed suit and I realised that I was still standing and quickly lowered myself onto my chair, perched at its edge, prepared to bolt if he ordered me from his house. Yet he seemed rather calm and not at all like I had imagined while taking those two buses and walking three blocks to reach this neighbourhood.

“Irish,” he said. “Catholic. Can you cook?”

“Yes, sir.”

Donatello made a wet grumble in his throat that sounded pleased and clapped his hands together. He stood from his chair and it rolled wildly without his weight. I half-rose from my seat, until I noted the Italian man still slumped in his chair, unmoving apart from the bob of his shoe.

I dropped back down, flushed pink all over again, hoping I had not looked too stupid in front of Donatello Fadda. He held his hands behind his back and stared at the sheer curtains before his eyes flit to the Italian nearest to the sofa.

“Adriano, find Rabbi. Bring him here.” Donatello Fadda looked at me. “We have Irish in the house, already.”

Pulling the lapels of his expensive suit together and buttoning them, Adriano stood from his seat and left the room, softly drawing the door shut behind him. The room settled into its cocoon of muffled sound again, like its walls had been stuffed and padded to block out all sound within the house.

Donatello had drooping bags under his eyes, eyes that took me in rather thoughtfully as he turned away from the window and returned to his seat. I tried not to seem too surprised that he had said they had someone Irish here. I had imagined myself to be first.

“If you want the room, it is yours,” he said. “If you want the job, it is yours.”

I felt my mouth turn slack and dry. He had hardly asked me anything significant. Yet his face was serious, there was no sign that he was messing me around. I would have lodgings – a room, _my_ room. Excitement bubbled in my stomach.

I said, “Thank you, Mr Fadda.”

“It will be my wife who instructs you,” he continued breezily. “I run the business. She runs the house. So it goes.”

From the hall there were fresh footsteps and nobody stood this time around for the man who wandered into the room as if he had not remembered what his reason was for being there in the first place.

He held himself in a strange manner, too. He was swallowed by his tattered off-green coat that frayed around its pockets and lining. He wore a threadbare hat atop his dark hair that parted on either side of his temples. He kept his boots unpolished, their maroon colour dulled by dirt and scuffmarks.

If he had unfurled those tight shoulders, he would have stood taller than any man in that room. 

“Rabbi, Ava McCarthy.” Donatello Fadda waved his hand generally toward me, around me, beyond me. “She will be housekeeper. She take the room beside yours. You show it to her and then you drive her home.”

He added something in Italian, tilting his head between us. I was even more surprised that Rabbi nodded; the Irishman could speak Italian.

Rabbi reached for the handle of the door and already I felt myself dismissed to his care, my hands clasping the purse that I had brought with me. Donatello Fadda had turned his squeaking leather chair to his left, stretching out one meaty hand toward his telephone. The other Italians lit their cigarettes and leaned back.

I had anticipated being led around the house like had often happened with other jobs, shown which cupboards held what and where should be swept and then I would be told that my wages would be docked if I missed this spot or that in particular. Donatello Fadda had not talked about wages. He had not talked about what went where.

I considered opening that mouth of mine and asking these questions myself, but I felt eyes pricking at me and saw that Rabbi was staring me down, almost _warning_ me that my time in this room had ended and it was best to take what I had gotten. I was not sure what about him had told me that, but I stood from my seat and went toward him, purse in hand, dress still ironed and clean. 

Rabbi pulled open the door and stood aside for me to walk ahead of him.

Outside, in the hall, he tugged his collar around him and sank behind it for comfort, stuffing his hands into his pockets and slinking alongside me. He had a hunch in his posture that forced himself down, looking always at the ground. From the kitchen, there was the sound of chatter and clutter and I wondered where the wife of this family might have been if not in there, because she was supposed to be the one bossing me around, like Fadda had said.

Yet there was only Rabbi here for me.

He motioned toward a staircase and went ahead of me this time, the rustle of his coat the sole sound which followed us into the furthest parts of the house, past the bedrooms with doors half-opened, showing lush wooden beams and bedposts and drapes.

Rabbi turned on his heel and took another staircase that narrowed at its summit onto one square patch of carpet that was too small for me to stand beside him. There was a door on the left and the right and another in-between them. While I waited on the staircase below him, he opened the door to his right and stepped inside, leaving enough space for me to follow him.

“My room,” he said, tilting his head at the door across from mine. “And the bathroom is between us. Never use the ones downstairs. If somethin’ breaks in your room or that bathroom, you tell me an’ I’ll fix it.”

His voice was grizzly and hoarse from disuse. I stood in the threshold of the room and stared around at its bright, airy lightness with pinewood floorboards, its triangular windows angled to draw in cold-white sunlight. I wandered that room with the distinct sense that I had gotten lucky and that I would never have landed a job like this without Nell being the housekeeper for that Moreno family in Cleveland.

I leaned against the windowsill. The windows overlooked the back-garden of the house, where the trees grew thick along the fences and blocked the neighbouring houses from sight, the red-brick walls spotted through the trembling branches being the only sign that there even were other houses in this posh neighbourhood. The grass was damp and wet; it stuck to the leather shoes that all these men seemed so fond of wearing.

“Do they stand out there all day?”

Rabbi lifted his head from where he had been looking at the ground. “And night,” he said.

He had sidled toward the doorway, like he wanted to slip out and disappear while my back was turned. I had not known it until I turned from the window to look at him. He held his hat between his hands and plopped it back onto his dark crop of hair the moment that he saw I was watching him. I wondered if he was Jewish and figured it would not be so surprising if he was.

Already Rabbi had shown himself to be a man of many surprises.

I wondered, too, if he had always been in this place, because he seemed to contort himself between the gaps in its furniture like he had often hidden in their shadows. He seemed to look for blind-spots where he might not be noticed. I wondered if he was not also one of those men who walked around the garden at night with grass upon his shoes.

“D’you like the room?”

His question had been sudden and posed awkwardly, like he had wanted to fill up the space between us in that room, the largest room that I had ever known even if it was tucked up in the attic.

“If I tell you what I really think, you’ll laugh,” I said.

He moved his hands in his pockets as if he held them out at me. “Not one for laughin’, me.”

I twisted the strap of my purse and smiled at him. “I lived in a tiny flat with my mother for years. So, if they had given me a _closet_ in this house, I think I’d have been happy enough with it. But this is –…”

“Better than a closet.”

He finished for me, speaking in that calm, flat manner of his that had become familiar in the few minutes that I had known him.

“Much better,” I said, smile widening.

His shoulders rose and fell rather limply. “Come on, then. Supposed to take you home, Ms. McCarthy.”

“Call me Ava.” I turned to look at him properly. “Is that really your name? Rabbi?”

“Nickname.”

I felt his awkwardness like it was my own, now. “So, can I ask what your real name is, then?”

For one brief moment, his eyes roamed past me and looked out those looming windows toward the garden below. I worried that I had offended him, though it was hard to tell. His brows were not furrowed, his mouth not held in a scowl. He seemed neither upset nor happy. He was simply _there_ , in the room, with me, in the same way that its curtains were, in the same way that its wardrobe and bedside table were in the room, with me.

He finally drew his eyes to me again. “Doesn’t matter.”

⁕

There were still those Italian men stood around the doorway. Lumpish clouds of smoke from their cigarettes mingled with the crisp air that scorched my cheeks and made me draw my scarf tight around my throat. One Italian man called out something to Rabbi and the others tittered.

I slowed, unsure if Rabbi would pause for a conversation, but he strode forward and gently grasped the arm of my coat to bring me along with him, something that I had not expected from him since he seemed so adverse to touch and closeness, even if it was accidental.

I followed him along the driveway toward a plum-coloured car. He opened the passenger side for me and waited until I had gotten inside to slam it shut, then strode around to his own side.

“Was it bad?”

He fished around his pockets for keys and glanced at me. “What d’you mean?”

“What he said. The Italian fella. Did he say somethin’ bad?”

“No. Made a joke, is all.”

I saw through his light, bland tone. “But you’re not one for laughin’.”

“No,” he said. “I’m not.”

He pulled out from the driveway and not once did he glance in his mirrors at the house that dwindled from sight behind us.

⁕

The streets were still slick and wet from drizzle that had fallen not a few hours earlier. The car rolled damply to a halt at the traffic-lights and we sat together, quiet and unsure of each other. I had only met Irish girls around this town.

My landlord was an Englishman and I loathed him. He left radiators broken, left mould fester in fuzzy blue-black patches along the windowsill, left mice in the floorboards to scuttle back and forth at night. I had not slept well with those mice scratching at the wood beneath my bed. I imagined there was no such noise in a house like what the Faddas owned.

I leaned my head against the rest and smiled to myself, warmed by the soft orange streetlights that bathed the car in brief flashes. I watched the lovers and loners wandering the streets, arms linked, arms hung low against their sides, mouths open, mouths closed.

America was so much faster than anywhere else I had ever known and I was certain that there was some difference in the soil that pushed strangers forward, had them swept up in such a hurry all the time. I liked the hum of the engine in this car and thought about all those girls in my town, those girls who used to hope that they might someday sit in a car like this one.

“I remember the first time I saw a car,” I told him suddenly.

I had a giddiness in my stomach; that was what had made me speak and maybe he knew it and allowed it for that reason. I felt delirious because he had been so kind and the job was _mine_ and the room was _mine_ and all the bad things that I had fretted about for the past few months melted and fled into the cold of the night through the opening of his rolled-down window.

“The first time I saw a car,” I went on, “I was standin’ on a dirt road and these great big yellow eyes started comin’ toward me, between the trees. I thought it was somethin’ alive until my brother told me. Wasn’t even old enough to know better.”

Rabbi tapped a mindless rhythm against the wheel. “When did you get off the boat?”

“Got off the boat two months ago," I told him. "How about you? Where are you from?”

“American,” he said. “Not Irish. Never came from nowhere.”

This stirred me from my dreamlike world and I lifted my head to look at him. He broadened his vowels like an American but almost everything else about him was Irish. If he had been lined up against a wall of Englishmen and Frenchmen and all other kinds of men, I would have plucked him out for an Irishman without a doubt. There was something in him that marked him for it. I challenged him and spoke in Irish – something to tease him, bring out what he wanted so much to smother.

“If you will not tell me what those other Italians said, then maybe you will tell me what Mr Fadda said to you in that room after he introduced me to you.”

Rabbi had a habit of ticking his jaw. His tongue poked at his cheek. He ran it then along his teeth. “T’would be better for you not to understand,” he said finally. “Does no harm to you for not knowin’ it. Keep to yourself and you’ll be grand. Do the job you’re given and no-one will bother you. No-one will bother you anyway.”

I sank against my seat. “Okay.”

“Call him Don Fadda. None of that _Mr_ Fadda or the like. Don is what they call him, so Don is what you’ll call him,” he continued. “Keep to yourself. I mean it. Better off on your own.”

“Is that how you survived here so long – stayin’ by yourself?”

Slowing in front of some traffic-lights, his face was hidden in a shroud of blue from a gap between passing streetlights. It drew out the lines of his forehead, the little furrows around his mouth. It was hard to tell his age, hard to tell anything, he kept himself so wound tight that he furled in on himself. His brows were drawn heavy to his eyes, veiling them in a faint shadow that let him decide when to show himself and when not – it seemed he had decided not, then, in that moment of blue between streetlights.

“Sorry, Rabbi,” I said. “I wasn’t thinkin’. If I offended you – …”

“How’d you get to the house?”

Surprised by the change in subject, I stumbled on my words. “T-Took two buses and then walked the rest. Why?”

His eyes skimmed the street, the mirrors that showed cars parked behind us, the dials on the radio. Anything but me. “D’you want a lift tomorrow mornin’?”

“Really? Would it not be puttin’ you out?”

“No,” he said flatly. “Got suitcases, don’t you?”

“Just one. Hardly had enough to warrant two.”

“I’ll be ‘round for seven.”

Pulling into a spot in front of the block of flats where I lived, he sat motionless for a moment and considered the building, tipping his head down to look at its tallest row without the roof of the car in his way. I gathered my purse and tucked the tip of my scarf between the flaps of my coat, preparing myself for the brittle wind that had begun lapping at the car the later into the evening that it had gotten.

The cold in America was different from cold in Ireland; our cold was soft and wet, a damp muggy cold from the humidity. Yet the cold here in America felt much sharper and nipped at the skin like an animal spurned to bite at each gust. I reached out and held the handle of the door, prepared to push it open until I paused, considering something I had forgotten.

“Can I ask you one last thing, Rabbi?” He nodded and I asked, “D’you know of any Catholic churches in this part of town? I told Don Fadda that I attended every Sunday. I did in Ireland, but I’d hoped I might wiggle out of it here. But he asked and I told him – well, I told him that I did and so now I have to.”

“They’ll take you to their church,” he replied. “So it doesn’t matter what church you had or don’t have. You go with them, now, wherever they want you.”

“No gettin’ out of it, then.”

“No gettin’ out of it,” he repeated.

Watching him in the dimly-lit front of the car, his pale face shown only in the headlights of the cars rumbling past, I suspected that I had been talking about mass but he had meant something else entirely.

“Seven,” he reminded me. “Don’t be late. Mrs Fadda won’t forgive it.”

“Thank you, Rabbi.”

I smiled and shoved the door open, nudging it wider with my hip before slipping out into the night. I turned to shut the door behind me and watched him roll up his windows. I stood away while he pulled out into the street. The plum-coloured car trundled forward and disappeared around a corner, his silhouette bleak and faint in front. 

⁕

There was a leak in the hall that brought trickles down from the floorboards in cool, pale shadows. I peeled off my scarf and trudged upstairs, the creaking steps echoing into the quiet of the flats. There were some Greek families on the first floor and Germans staying on the second but I had hardly seen any of them.

I stuck my key in its lock and rattled it three times before the door shuddered open. I went into the bathroom and took a few moments to right myself, undoing the braid that held my curly hair together and feeling lighter for it.

The bedroom had an uncomfortable brittleness to it, without the radiator to heat it. I ate a handful of biscuits in my bed, uncaring of crumbs and messes. I would have another room, in the morning.

I would pack my suitcase before I slept; it would not take long with the little that I had in my wardrobe. I wished that I could have called Nell to tell her how it had gone but Woolridge would never let me use his phone.

I lay against my pillow and stared at the ceiling, listening to the distant chatter and shouts from other flats. I liked to imagine it how dollhouses looked, with each square room slotted against another, our little bodies moving around within our wallpapered surroundings and passing between rooms. I fell asleep like that, picturing the wallpapered room which would be mine, the bathroom alongside it, and Rabbi in the room across the hall.

⁕

In the night, I awoke and felt the shifting weight of someone in the bed alongside me; rasping, mouthing, shuddering. There a brutish crack. I jolted from the bed, looked for the shine of dulled silver and then, seeing it had not yet come for me, fell back against my bed with a thump, the sheets seeming to swell around me and hold me there.

⁕


	2. two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> notes at the end! x

two

_then_

**_⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕_ **

The two bodies lay limp in the mud, looking at the colourless clouds that drifted overhead. I watched my mother slip down the slope and stand above my father. She made awful, hard sounds with her chest like she was choking on her own blood. She was flapping her hands like a bird flaps its wings, flapping and flapping. The rain had turned her hair to frizz and springing curls, black strands lashing against her pale face as she looked back and forth, taking in the brownish lump that was Lynch and then, at her boots, the bluer tones of my father. One strap of his suspenders had slipped off in his fall and curled awkwardly beneath his arm, like it held him down against the soil.

I watched my mother bend down and pull up his legs to drag him around the house; not _into_ it, but _around_ it.

Hoarsely, I called, “What are you doin’?”

“Help me with him,” she said. “Take his legs for me.”

I never understood what pushed me to cross the sodden garden and heave his ankles up and hold his boots against my chest while my mother shifted around and gripped him under his arms. His head lolled. The shot had gotten him in the throat where little rivers of red flooded from an engorged black dot – one tiny and miniscule dot that had taken down a man like my father, who I had always admired for his brute strength and hardiness, toiling on the land, the land which had belonged to his father and his father before him and his father before him –…

The land which was now muddy and streaked in weak, watery puddles of blood that splashed beneath our shoes.

“The other fellas that work for Abbott will come lookin’ for Lynch,” she breathed out. “And they’ll want to know what happened.”

There was spittle on her chin. Her eyes rolled madly around, her teeth drawing at her lip. Neither of us were thinking like we should have been, taking in the horror of it, the sheer distortion of what had earlier been a calm and quiet day like all others. She was jumping ahead of herself in her speech and babbling in a way that was not like her.

She had always been quiet, docile. She sat in that bedroom with my brother for nights on end, watching over him, wiping his mouth and cheeks of sweat and changing his sheets and bringing him water. She had been so silent sometimes that I had sometimes forgotten she was in the cottage at all.

But here, in front of me, she was wide-eyed and cold and smearing a bloodied hand against her mouth.

“Then we tell them,” I said. “It was Da who shot him and Lynch who shot back.”

“They’ll want us out. End of the week, Lynch said. How would your brother survive that?”

“They would understand.”

“No,” she said. “They would blame us – want us out. Who would take us? No-one. We bury them.”

“It’s not fair.” I felt a hot welling behind my eyes. “Not right.”

“No such thing as fair and right,” she told me. “Only what’s happenin’.”

His boots were slippery and I had to grip the laces. I was pleading with her while we placed my father near the wall that had been drawn behind our house to separate it from the wild fields. She wiped her mouth again; it stained her lips in a colour that was not naturally hers, given she had lost it all in the climb and haul of bringing my father this far.

I felt so dazed that it hardly occurred to me that this was all so strange, so surreal, not what could happen around these parts and even if it _could_ happen around these parts, it could not happen to _us_.

Yet I could not bring myself, even in that hazy state, to look down at my father lain in the dirt.

“Go inside and watch your brother for me. I’ll come for you later,” she said. “Not married, Lynch. No wife. Who would notice him missin’?”

She was not speaking to me anymore. She was speaking to herself, white puffs slipping from between her lips. I went into the house and breathed in its sour blend of sawdust and hay, a scent which I once loved, but that I suddenly hated with all of my being.

James was in his bed, soft and pliant. I settled on the stool beside him and brought him fresh water, which only stirred some dormant cough in his throat. I held a tissue against his mouth and saw that already my hands had been stained a rusted colour.

⁕

The world outside had turned a murky purple. There was a rustling at the door and my mother came through into the bedroom. She was like a beast about to be slaughtered. The whites of her eyes showed more and more in a strange roll from one end of the room to the other. She called for me and I followed her out into the garden and neither of the bodies was there.

I followed her further up the hill and down its other side closest to the creak and we crossed its wet stones in the dark. I looked behind at the orange glow of the windows in the house, unaware of just when I had risen from that stool to light the candles myself.

There were furrows in the field where she brought me, great long lines of soil turned and deepened, which my father had been doing for a while before his sudden death in the garden. It had been close to wintertime, he had had no reason to turn that soil like he did, but there was something that gripped my father about touching the ground and toiling on it. He had been working at it for weeks, spending wasted hours out there.

My mother had put the bodies, together, in the same row. I wished she had put them apart. I marvelled at her strength, her hardiness. There was a wheel-barrow nearby that she had used to haul them up and down but Lynch had rolled out, she told me, into the creek, gotten wet and smashed his head on a rock.

 _Don’t look at his face_ , she said. _Not a face anymore_.

She needed me to help turn more soil on them – to bury them, put them beneath the earth where no-one would find them. I wanted to ask what she was thinking but no words came. I helped her. I helped her without knowing why, without trying to talk sense into her again. I turned the soil, more soil, great mashed-up lumps of soil which lifted and splattered them and I thought, half-bent over the body of my father, that he blinked. He was _blinking_ , the hole in his throat was rippling, pouring down into the mud. Weak, watery streaks.

Clumps of soil spattered his eyelids, fluttered, then closed. He had not been fully gone until that last toss of soil onto his chest.

⁕

And all the while we walked back to the cottage, I thought to myself, _had she known that he was not yet dead? Could we not have called for someone to help him? Could we not have done something differently? Why did we do that, why did she want him buried –…_

⁕

The purple shade of night lifted and brought a feebler white to the clouds. The goldfinches stirred in their nests and started to call to one another, bringing about dawn in their flitting and singing, repeating motions over and over like they always had done through some innate instinct within themselves to do it, without ever thinking why they did it, only knowing that they would do it and had to do it.

⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕

_now_

At six-thirty, the pipes rattled and the neighbours wandered between their rooms, their footsteps flat and dense against the wooden floorboards that then creaked and stirred me from sleep. I looked across the creased bedsheets and stared blankly at the wall for a moment before I remembered Rabbi would come soon enough.

I hauled myself into the bathroom to brush the knots in my hair and pat some colour onto my cheeks. I had already packed the few clothes that I owned and wore a powder-blue dress. I had placed the book about birds atop all the other stuff and clipped shut the suitcase, hauling it toward the door.

Then, I went downstairs and stuffed an envelope of rent through the letter-box for Mr Woolridge and signed it _Eabha_ because I felt I had to hold onto something that had not yet gotten left behind on the ship the day I arrived, something that otherwise would have slid down between the port and the gangplank, plopping sadly into the water without my noticing it.

I had stared at the letters long enough for them to sizzle into my mind and linger still while I sat waiting for Rabbi, my suitcase tucked alongside me.

⁕

There was no clock in the hallway and I had no watch. The small little clock that had sat on the bedside table belonged to Mr Woolridge and so I had left it there. I waited and waited so much that I worried he had forgotten, or that his plum-coloured car had broken down someplace.

Then I heard two short taps against the door. Stood on the footpath outside, Rabbi looked first at me and second at my suitcase. He leaned forward, took it from me and, soft and flat like in the car the night beforehand, he said again, “No gettin’ out of it.”

“No gettin’ out of it,” I repeated, smiling at him.

He lifted his head, tilting his hat back against his dark hair. “D’you remember what I told you?”

“Do the job, keep to myself.” I followed him out into the street and saw that he had driven here in a green car instead. Rabbi placed the suitcase into the boot and rounded the car, slipping into the front. I sat beside him and finished, “No-one will bother me, that way.”

Rabbit started the engine. “Good,” he said. “’Cause Mrs Fadda is waitin’ for you already.”

⁕

The car rolled into the driveway and crushed gravel beneath its wheels, a crunch that rocked us gently back and forth toward the front of the house where we slowed to a halt. Rabbi turned off the engine and watched out the windows lined in dying frost, melting down into white pearls that slithered further along the glass and longed to touch the tweed of his coat.

He shifted his elbow too quickly. The pearls shimmered into nothingness. He was looking at me and there was no sound between us because the windows cut off the noise from the house and all the neighbourhood around us, like we lived in our own little cocoon.

“I want to tell you somethin’,” he said. “Supposed to be helpin’ you, so I want to tell you. The sisters’ll be here later. Not all of ‘em today, but prob’ly Maxia.”

I stared at him. “Sisters?”

“You got Alma, the oldest girl. Then Maxia in the middle and Lidia is the last,” he said. “Maxia should be ‘round the most, like I told you. Movin’ back in this week, she is. Comes back now and then.”

“What for?”

Rabbi rested his hands on the wheel of a car not in motion, his head tilted back against the rest. “Mrs Fadda gets funny moods, sometimes. Started a while back and hasn’t stopped. Wakes up fine for months on end – then one day, she’ll not get out of bed for hours and Maxia has to be called ‘round to look after her. Black moods, I call ‘em. Nothin’ to be done for her.”

“She’s rich, isn’t she? Can’t she visit those shrinks who talk about heads and dreams and the lot?”

The pearly drops rippled down along the window behind him again. “Not their way,” he said simply. “You understand what I mean by those black moods, don’t you?”

I had known black moods well; had done what Maxia did and cared for my own mother between her shifting colours and I wondered if Mrs Fadda would do what mine did and wander rooms, talking to herself, looking for things that were already in her hand and then laying down in bed and not rising again until she had grown stale and creased like the sheets beneath her. I had known black moods. I had known them well.

I let my eyes drift to the house. “I understand,” I said. “I know they had a German girl and she – well, she had to leave. Maybe Don Fadda wanted another housekeeper to fill her spot and spare Mrs Fadda and her daughter more stress at the same time.”

There was a soft crack in his voice. “Dunno. He didn’t tell her ‘bout you ‘til last night.”

“You’re tellin’ me Mrs Fadda never even knew he was hirin’?”

Rabbi clucked his tongue against his teeth. “Don Fadda got into the habit of not tellin’ his wife matters that were about his business – got into the habit then of tellin’ her nothin’ at all. Only tells her what’s happenin’ right before it happens, so she can’t react too bad to it, y’know, with them moods she has. Not too sure sometimes how she’ll take things, is all. But the girls were there. Said they’d come ‘round to see this new housekeeper, see what you’re about. Heard ‘em talkin’.”

“You weren’t eatin’ with them then?”

“No. I don’t eat with them. And you won’t be eatin’ with them either. You’ll be eatin’ with me, after the family finishes and only in the kitchen, not in the dinin’ room. Or in your own room if you prefer it.”

Though I had imagined that for myself, I had never thought that Rabbi would be confined to the kitchen or his room in the same manner because he had been around so long. He was not allowed at their dinner-table, not allowed even in their dining-room. I had the image of him, hunched against a kitchen countertop, poking at one sparse plate of dried-up leftovers while the Faddas bunkered down someplace else where they would not notice him. He would be unseen, slouching up to his room like a child scolded and sent away. But Rabbi was no child.

I had been too quiet, because Rabbi asked, “Hardly thought you’d be eatin’ with them, did you?”

I shook my head. “No. But I thought you might, livin’ in the house like you do. I’ll eat with you. If it doesn’t bother you.”

Rabbi looked down at that space between us; it was hard to tell what he thought and harder still to tell if he thought anything about it at all. “Doesn’t bother me,” he said shortly. “Nothin’ bothers me.”

He shifted in his seat and his door clicked.

Quietly, I called out, “Rabbi?”

His door swung, half-open.

“Thanks,” I said. “Again – for helpin’ me, I mean.”

“Don’t thank me,” he said. “I’m only tellin’ you what you’ll learn for yourself soon enough.”

Though his door was still ajar, he had not gotten out of the car. It seemed he was studying something on the ground or his shoes. Then, suddenly, he moved. 

He walked to the boot, pulling out my suitcase. I climbed from the car and started the short walk toward the house. The grass was damp and swayed in a light breeze. Somewhere from the trees came a light, delicate little whistle that sang out and settled, sang out and settled; a song which made me think of wet soil and sinking into mud with tired, aching bones.

“Goldfinch,” I said.

“What?”

Rabbi was walking alongside me, one hand around the handle of my suitcase and the other in his pocket, still taller than me even if he slouched. He had been distracted, watching the Italian men who sat on that porch ahead of us, posed like figures in a painting who were smoking the same cigarettes and throwing the same cards between them that they had been yesterday evening when I had left with Rabbi.

“American goldfinch,” I told him.

His eyes rose to the blend of trees overhead, blind, unseeing of the little bodies hidden on the branches and singing to one another. He had been so focused on those Italians that he had not noticed the trees and the grass and the birdsong. He was blind to everything but what was in and around that house.

“Seems to be a lot of them ‘round,” I said.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “Seems to be.”

He had forgotten about those little birds because one of the Italian men had stood from his seat on the porch and wandered to the steps we would have to take. He stretched out his arms and waved with one hand at us, though it was clear that this was not some friendly greeting. Rabbi had unknowingly drawn his brows together like he often seemed to do, so deep in his thinking that he also seemed to bunker further into his pale green coat.

“Irish girl,” the Italian called out. It was the Italian who had been sitting in the room with me yesterday, smoking his cigarette, bobbing his shoe, humming his old folk song. “Back for more!”

I heard no goldfinches. He had frightened them off. I had never learned his name because he had never offered it and he did not offer it then, either, when we took the few steps onto the porch. He sidled in front of myself and Rabbi, blocking the front door, cocking his head and pursing his lips as he looked between us.

What seemed more strange to me was that Rabbi had not reacted like it was all that odd to be blocked and corralled like we were children in a playground.

Instead, he spoke coarsely and calmly and looked at the door while he did it. “Mrs Fadda is waitin’ on her,” he said. “Wants to show her ‘round.”

Tossing another card onto the table, another Italian spoke up from behind the man who blocked us and said one short, blunt sentence in his own tongue that made the others snort. Rabbi watched him and shifted from foot to foot, tugging the front of his coat closer around him. He sniffed and motioned toward the door again.

The Italian who stood in front of us did not laugh. He simply arched his brow and nodded in return.

“Of course,” he drawled, his accent smooth and clicking. “Mrs Fadda cannot be kept waiting.”

He reached out and held open the door. Rabbi took another long look at him before striding forward with a purpose I had not yet seen in him. I shuffled past that Italian man who smiled mockingly at me. I had done nothing to him other than come from another country and that was all there was to it, so I tried to let it slide but it was settling in my stomach like a hardened pebble had dislodged itself from the driveway and had somehow gotten into me, churning and churning.

I had needed the job and Nell had done a lot for me and so there was really no turning around, no asking Rabbi if he might know of someplace else that would take an Irish girl, no slinking away with my tail tucked between my legs, red-faced and begging Mr Woolridge to rent my old flat to me again.

_No gettin’ out of it._

I said weakly, “Another joke from those guys on the porch, huh?”

Rabbi looked down at me, unsmiling and curt. “Another joke,” he said.

It struck me that I made too many assumptions about him. I imagined him quiet and meek, but he had seemed prepared to defend himself. It would have been wrong to think him afraid of those Italians on the porch; it was not fear but rather some kind of strange anticipation, like he had already envisioned how things would unfold and he was simply moving through each motion because none of it was new to him, none of it particularly different than what it had been for him every other day in this house.

But if that was the truth, why would he stay in a house where he felt unwelcome? Was he like me, in need of money and lodgings and willing to swallow insults and jibes if it meant somewhere to sleep?

Rabbi loosened his lanky frame from its tight hold and spoke a little more like he usually did – calmly, more understanding. He seemed much more at ease without others around him. He was only accepting of me, I thought, because I was no threat to him and certainly no comparison to those Italian men on the porch. I toddled behind him like a lost infant, thrown into some foreign and frightening place. But it was much simpler than that.

I was nothing but a housekeeper.

“C’mon,” he said finally. “Mrs Fadda should be ‘round the house somewhere.”

Rabbi allowed me to walk ahead of him.

The house was sombre. Its curtains were so heavy that sunlight was muffled and pale, drawing out the dark green wallpaper and heavy red drapes that hung around the windows. It felt more like a funeral home with long, miserable halls that swallowed light and breathed shadows. Rabbi was so familiar with these halls that he seemed much more comfortable in its inky spots than he had on the porch where he could be seen so clearly.

From the kitchen, a woman called, “Is this her?”

Rabbi went through an arch and pulled off his hat. “It is, Mrs Fadda,” he said, motioning behind himself at me. “This is Ava McCarthy.”

Furthest from where we stood was a rounded wall dotted in windows that showed the garden through the doily folds of the curtains. The circular table was dressed for a breakfast that had not been served and which seemed would not be served either. The air was stale, bitter. 

Mrs Fadda sat and sipped at coffee. She looked through those curtains, into the garden. She had gaunt cheekbones, like Rabbi. Her hair had been pinned and curled at this hour and she wore a beige dress, her wrists and hands adorned in bracelets and rings that sparked against the light. I thought of silver, shining dully.

“Ava,” she repeated distantly. “Come, sit. I want to speak with you.”

I stepped forward and gingerly moved a chair aside to sit across from her. I glanced behind at Rabbi, whose tall frame stood slanted and awkward in the arch, one sliver of a silhouette that blended into the heavy tones of the hall.

“Rabbi, bring her suitcase to her new room, would you?”

His footsteps disappeared into the hallway. I heard the carpet on the staircase sigh and rub; the only sign that he had even been here at all. Mrs Fadda sipped delicately at her coffee and kept her focus on that garden where two or three Italians seemed to walk in a slow march around the garden furniture still speckled in dew, passing between the trees, ignoring the gentle trill of the goldfinches overhead.

“Do you have children?”

I was surprised. “No, Mrs Fadda.”

“I have children,” she said airily. “Three boys, three girls. Balanced, three of each. You should want girls. Girls will stay with you, care for you, when you are old. Boys will kiss your cheek and leave. Did you know this?”

Her accent, much like the other Italians in the house, was strong and ticked at her words.

I smoothed down my skirt and said, “No, Mrs Fadda.”

She hummed. “My mother warned me,” she said. “Somehow, I imagined it would be different for me. What about your mother? Is she alive?”

There was a stillness in the room that matched the mahogany walls around her, contrasting the cold yellow light that filtered down and harshened the worn lines of her face. I thought about what Rabbi had said, in the car, with the frost creeping up along the windows; about her moods, her husband.

“No,” I said, clearing my throat. “Died many years ago.”

“Shame,” she said. “I tell my boys that they should visit their mother, love their mother. I heard a story that I think about now. I heard that mothers should raise their boys to be coffin-makers. Then, when she dies, her son will make her a beautiful coffin. He will put all his love into it, all his attention. He will understand. You know who told me that story?”

“Who?”

“A grandmother in my village,” she replied. “Old lady. She used to slice apples and make me eat them. I taste them now. So bitter. Not like the apples here.”

She was a strange woman and nothing like what I had envisioned. She showed that Italian strength and care for her children yet her eyes had a blankness to them. I had seen it in my mother. Her shoulders rose and remained hunched around her as she leaned forward with her elbows on the table.

“I want you to do the rugs on Thursday morning,” she said. “Every Thursday, the ladies come to play bridge and I want those rugs looking wonderful. Brought over from the old country, those rugs. Some belonged to my great-grandmother. You won’t cook. I don’t want that Irish food, I want real food – _Italian_ food. You will make only sandwiches for my youngest son for his lunch, but you will not make anything more than that. You can eat with Rabbi, in the kitchen. There will be leftovers for you.”

Throughout her sudden, much longer speech, I had bobbed my head like a little doll knocked back and forth and she had not done anything with herself other than stay in that stonelike pose.

“Did Rabbi tell you about my daughters?”

“Only their names.”

She licked her lips. “Maxia wants to stay here for a few weeks,” she said. “Married her husband a few years ago but still needs help from her mother, you understand.”

I remembered how Rabbi had looked at me in the car when he talked about her black moods and Maxia and how Don Fadda hardly told his wife anything about his business and even less about himself. Mrs Fadda was saving face.

Suddenly, the size of the house struck me and I imagined it at night, those long halls stretching onward, those drapes turning liquid and black and cutting off all the moonlight that could soften her world. Had she intentionally made her house so dark or had it developed like that in some natural, unthought-of mirror of what Rabbi had called her moods?

“I understand,” I said gently.

“You’re Catholic?”

“Yes, Mrs Fadda.”

She studied me with the first semblance of awareness in her eyes. “We attend church on Sundays. You will come with us.”

“Yes, Mrs Fadda.”

“I want you to polish those frames,” she said, nodding at the handful of paintings along the wall of Saints with serene faces and hands clasped in prayer. “Italians brought art to this world, you know. All the techniques, the methods – _Italians_ made them first. I want the photographs dusted, silverware cleaned. Have you cleaned silverware?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll be very careful, Mrs Fadda.”

She was scrutinising me with a tightness in her expression that suddenly dropped.

“Don’t spend too long on them. A gift from my mother-in-law, one of many after my marriage to Donatello. I hate them.” Her bluntness startled me. She brushed at some lint that clung to the folds of her dress. She added, like an afterthought, “May she rest in peace.”

I nodded slowly and still did not speak simply because I could not gauge what she wanted from me. It was almost like she would have talked whether I was in the room with her or not. I wondered if she was not simply very lonely and if that was the root of her moods and her dark furniture and her strange mannerisms.

“I would like for you to wash and change the sheets, too,” she continued. “Even for the guest rooms. Our family visits often, I want them to feel welcomed with clean sheets. I want you to air the rooms upstairs. Those rooms need fresh air in the morning but you must remember to close the windows in the evening or it will start to become too damp. This weather – nothing like what I had as a little girl in my country.”

“Yes, Mrs Fadda.”

“You’ll finish most days by six if you get all the chores finished. Weekends are yours, except for one hour on Saturday to fetch the little things I need from the store and two hours on Sunday for church. You can take care of the laundry. But you must be aware, my eldest, Josto – he’s very particular about how his shirts are ironed,” she said. “He will instruct you. It used to be that I did all these things, when we first came to America.”

Then again came that film across her eyes that made her seem distant, like she floated far from this room, in another place.

“One suitcase,” she mumbled. “Only one suitcase you had with you.”

“Had not much else to bring with me,” I said.

“I only had one suitcase, too,” she murmured airily. “One suitcase with me on the boat, coming here, with Donatello. Italians, we face hardship – we _live_ it. But always we make something from it. What do they say here, in America, about lemons and lemonade? Italians, we do the same thing. We make fertile land from dead soil, we make one little house into an empire.”

She paused and touched her pearl necklace.

“You’re a pretty girl,” she said. “The last girl was pretty too. Stupid, though. She ended up pregnant because she believed an Italian man would leave his wife for her. Stupid, I told you. Italian men like to chase pretty girls, but they never leave their wives – never, never. You ignore them. No good for you, for any of them either. Now, for the plants –…”

From the hall, the sound of the front-door clacking shut cracked through the house and startled me; so quiet was her home that the noise seemed _violent_. There was a great hustle-and-bustle in that hall which filled up that emptiness and something seemed to breathe life into Mrs Fadda, who stood from her chair, swept up her cup and brought it to the sink. I was not sure what should be done on my part and pushed out my chair to follow her.

“Maxia,” she called out, “come to the kitchen. The Irish girl is here.”

Bustling through the arch, shuffling two children ahead of her and holding another in her arms, was Maxia, the middle daughter. Behind her, a tall man towered, ducking his head at the doorway. He carried several suitcases in both hands, dropping them alongside the cabinet. He tugged off his hat and politely nodded at myself and Mrs Fadda, who moved around to kiss his cheeks before kissing those of her daughter, tinged red from cold.

“And here I was expecting a redhead,” Maxia said lightly, glancing at me.

“Ava, this is my daughter, Maxia,” Mrs Fadda told me. “She takes care of me – like daughters should. What did I tell you? You must have daughters.”

Maxia neither held her hand out to me nor seemed to notice what her mother had said. Instead, she turned to that large man and clucked, “Antoon, darling, could you bring the bags upstairs?”

Antoon glanced at Maxia and reluctantly hiked the straps of the suitcases around his hands again, carting them back into the hall. Unlike Rabbi, whose footsteps seemed to blend into the silence of the house and melt away, Antoon made quite a racket of banging bags against walls and thumping into the bannister. Maxia smiled tightly at the spot where he had been and then spun toward me.

“Well, I should probably tell you how things are around here,” she said. “I don’t know how you Irish do it, but it won’t be that way _here_. Did you tell her about the rugs, Mama?”

“Yes, Maxia.”

“The rugs must be cleaned on Thursday mornings,” Maxia continued, as if Mrs Fadda had not spoken from her place behind the countertop. “Mama has bridge on Thursday evenings with her girlfriends. My father collects little figurines and those must be dusted daily. He can’t _bare_ for them to become dusty. Have you met Rabbi already? I heard you Irish flock together. He’ll show you around, I bet.”

I swallowed. “I met him yesterday. He’s been very kind.”

“ _Kind_ ,” Maxia repeated, smiling at me like she had smiled at that spot where her husband had been; yet the difference was that I was still standing in front of her but she smiled like I was not. “Yes, well, just be careful – no funny business. We already had that German girl! Never imagined that sort of behaviour from the Germans, but you Irish – well, we know how large Irish families can be, even larger than ours. Like rabbits!”

I flushed a dreadful pink and I felt so embarrassed for something that I had not even done, like a child who had been scolded, caught being awful and bold and now awaiting punishment for it, in the form of a belt lashed at bare legs or the harsh smack of a wooden spoon or whatever else was lined up for me and which simmered in her eyes.

"Catholic girl,” Mrs Fadda said, nodding at me. “The German was Protestant.”

Maxia paused, cocking her head. “You are?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m Catholic.”

Mrs Fadda brushed a strand of hair from her face. “I told you, it makes all the difference.”

“Yes, you were right, Mama.” Maxia smiled. “Always are.”

“Do you think I would let that German girl polish the paintings in the hall? The paintings of the Madonna? No! Nonna would turn in her grave.”

“Oh, no,” Maxia tutted. She sighed and peeled off her gloves. “Ava, perhaps we can start you off with a quick sweep of our room – second floor, I’ll show you.”

Briskly she clacked down the hall in those heels, all business and floral perfume wafting behind her, so that I scrambled to catch up with her. She walked with a swing in her hips and her hands were always moving to pick at imagined creases in her skirt or fluff her hair or move aside scattered toys and dolls that her children had taken from their luggage and which were already being thrown around the hall.

“What part of Ireland are you from?”

“Place called Kilneety. Small town near Cork, in the South,” I answered. “Probably never heard of it.”

“No,” she said. “Never heard of it. But then I know most of your country is a backwater if you go outside of Dublin, right? The Morenos have an Irish girl working for them, too. Adrianna tells me she has the _funniest_ little accent. Yours is much stronger than how Rabbi speaks, too. You say _cat-lick_. Not Cat _ho_ lic. Just the funniest thing.”

I was simmering into that pink shade which seemed permanent on my skin now, so that it licked at my ears and I felt aware of my feet sloshing in my shoes and my dress sticking to my body and the rubbing grind of my stockings. She was right that Rabbi spoke differently. I told myself that I would learn to talk like him – though Rabbi barely talked at all around these Italians, cutting his sentences even more shortly than he did with me.

Turning into a bedroom on the second floor with lavish bed-sheets and a mountainous pile of pillows posed against the headrest, Maxia held out her arms and sighed. She crossed the room toward the luggage thrown onto the bed, torn apart by the ravenous hands of her children, the dresses and shoes and coats dragged out in a messy lump. She sorted them out herself and I was hesitant to touch her things without permission. I had worked with families a lot less richer than the Faddas and even they had turned mean and nasty about their necklaces, bracelets and rings, their finery touched by _un_ -fine hands. 

Maxia modelled a pearl necklace against her throat and watched herself in the mirror on the vanity. “Really, Antoon spoils me,” she said. “Ever since he first courted me – if it sparkled, he bought it for me. Of course, I would tell him that I didn’t _need_ such things, but he was so insistent.”

I imagined that mute in the kitchen, hulking so tall that he had to crouch through the arch; the idea of him being insistent on anything made that pink on my cheeks lighten and fade because it seemed so funny.

“Italian men understand what their ladies want, you know,” she continued. “An intuition, almost. Are Irish men like that?”

“Depends on the Irishman,” I said.

Maxia puckered her lips and pulled away the necklace. “I brought what could fit in my suitcases but Antoon said he would have someone watch the house. These days, you just never _know_ – even your _neighbours_ could notice you were gone a few days and who _knows_ what they might do. I heard the most dreadful stories of houses robbed not a few streets away.”

I doubted that anyone would ever take one look at the Fadda house and consider robbing from it. I nodded and shook my head and nodded again, movements which were based more on her tone than what she said, the highs and lows of her speech that prattled on and on while she darted around the room like a sparrow and plucked this dress or that from her suitcases.

“Ava?”

I tilted my head – not quite a nod and not quite a shake. “Yes, Mrs Fadda?”

She tittered. “Not quite a Fadda anymore.”

“Oh, I forgot – I’m sorry –…”

“Mrs Dumini is fine. _Ma’am_ , too, I suppose.” She smiled with her lips peeled tightly against her teeth, where a smudge of red lipstick shone at the front. “Let’s start with how I like my dresses organised. For me, I always think ordering them based on season is a smart idea – but then, perhaps colour would be a little less work for me in the morning – what do you think?”

It mattered very little what I thought because she went right on talking, anyway.

Suddenly it hit me that I was nodding and shaking and nodding my head once more, like I had done in my homeland and which I did now again in a foreign room, in a foreign country with a foreign woman. Sometimes I felt that America was nothing more than a ladder and I had unknowingly landed on its bottom rung when I fell off the ship that first day and all above me were the other immigrants who had come here ahead of me and who boosted themselves up much quicker than I could, shouting down that if I simply worked harder, I would be where they were, it was just _that_ easy.

But then I looked at Rabbi and I wondered if that ladder was not shaking madly and tipping back and forth and losing some rungs while it did so, because it seemed we would not – _could_ not – climb any further without pushing ourselves up by stepping on the heads of those below, so it was an endless struggle of reaching and pushing and shoving and _hoping_.

That was just how I felt, sometimes. Other times, I craned my neck and thought that it must look pretty swell, all that way up that ladder, right at the top. But so far, I figured if I was sitting on the same rung as Rabbi, then that wasn’t so bad.

Maxia smiled again. “What do you think, Ava?”

I was nodding my head, shaking my head, nodding my head, over and over.

Outside, the goldfinches sang and sang. Inside, I was doing the same damned thing.

⁕

Later that afternoon, I climbed the winding staircase and went to the room that had become mine. I closed the door behind me and noticed a sliding latch that had not been there before. It was bulky and gold and clicked flatly if I pushed it down, but I kept it unlatched, the door itself already closed. I was tired, worn out from hanging dresses and dusting and sweeping already. Maxia had brought me around the house like I had imagined would happen did that first day that Don Fadda had hired me but never did.

Mrs Fadda had not been in the kitchen and not in the bedrooms, either. She had been sitting in the back-garden, in a white chair, looking out at the grass.

Maxia asked me to bring her mother blankets when she did that. Maxia had prepared a whole closet of soft, warm blankets for her mother and I wondered if this was something Mrs Fadda often did on her own. I nestled against my pillow, drifting off until two light taps on the door drew me out from my dreamlike world.

I thought that Maxia had come looking for me. No-one pushed from the other side – Maxia did not seem like the kind of woman who would wait for an answer – and so I slouched off the bed myself.

Rabbi stood on the other side. He had his hat pulled low, hands in his pockets. “Supposed to eat,” he said hoarsely. “Family had theirs, now we have ours.”

“Does your door have a latch like mine?”

He licked his lips and shook his head.

“Did Don Fadda want that? Worried or – …”

“I put it there,” he said. “Can take it down if you don’t like it.”

“No,” I said. “No, I like it.”

Rabbi took the stairs two at a time and walked easily to the kitchen once at the bottom. I heard noise around the house that filled it and left it warmer than it had been that morning. There was the crackle of the television in the sitting-room and I paused at the doorway to look in, spotting Maxia and her children watching some fellow on the screen talking and waving his hands about so that the audience laughed and the children laughed along with them.

Rabbi made a short, quiet whistle that drew my eyes back to him. He said nothing, yet I understood what he meant all the same, trailing him into the kitchen where two plates remained on the countertop, lathered in a helping of pasta and heavy sauce. He brought them to the table where I had met Mrs Fadda that morning. He sat in the cool light that came through the old, thick curtains.

“I thought I would have to cook,” I said. “When I first got the job, I mean. Don Fadda asked if I could.”

Rabbi shook his head. “No. Maxia does it whenever she stays,” he replied. “Takes pride in it, makin’ the traditional recipes passed down from her grandparents.”

I stirred my pasta and ate in small bites. He ate much faster and seemed not to like sitting in the kitchen; it had not escaped me that he had taken the chair that faced the arch and let him watch whoever passed in the hall. I thought about what Maxia had mentioned about my accent and my fork lowered.

“Rabbi? What religion are you?”

He eyed me warily. “I ain’t nothin’,” he said shortly. “Why?”

“Well, what were your family then?”

“What does it matter?”

“Just wonderin’ if you say _cat-lick_ ,” I mumbled, my lips betraying me with a smile. “Just somethin’ Maxia told me – that I say _cat-lick_ and not Cat _ho_ lic.”

“Oh.” His shoulders loosened. “Doesn’t matter. Don’t think on it.”

“Don’t think on it,” I repeated. Again, his stare was sharp, like he thought I was mocking him, so I added, “Well, I gotta start talkin’ a little more like you do.”

“Most folk still say I sound Irish.”

I smiled even more. “But you’re American.”

“That’s right,” he said, shifting in his chair. “I’m American.”

“If I want to do anythin’ with myself, that’s what people tell me I gotta be, over here,” I said. “But while they’re tellin’ me that, they keep tellin’ me too ‘bout their old country. Seems like somehow I need to be both, but never one more than the other.”

He stirred his food without ever eating it. “Hard to let go, I suppose. Some folk can’t ever let go.”

Down the hall, the light from the television bloomed and canned laughter rang through the house. For once, his eyes never strayed from mine; he looked right at me, unflinchingly, so that it was me who lowered my eyes, once again thinking that he was bolder than I had first thought him to be.

⁕

Stepping into my bedroom, I turned to look at Rabbi who balanced on that small scrap of carpet that separated our doors. The hall was bleak and dark without a lightbulb at the top, blurring his features. He pushed open his own door and I almost closed mine but the sound of voice in the blackness forced me into stillness.

He said, “Keep that latch down and don’t answer knockin’ unless you know who’s on the other side. I’ll only ever tap twice.”

I felt the staircase below us stretch down and down into one faint splotch of light. “Okay.”

He lingered. Then, he murmured, “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Rabbi.”

He closed his door and I closed mine. There was no sound from his room. I had the oddest sense that he was waiting for the click of that golden latch. I quickly slid it into place and waited a moment longer. His shoes creaked against his floorboards. He had been waiting to hear it after all.

⁕

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey guys! just a few things to clear up:
> 
> firstly the fadda women are not shown extensively in the show, especially mrs fadda so i took some liberties and i wanted more scenes with her so gave her an imagined personality (for both her and the two minutes we saw of maxia). hope you all don't mind but hey, they weren't shown that much.
> 
> secondly eabha is pronounced like ava if you aren't familiar with irish pronunciation
> 
> thirdly no place called kilneety exists in ireland as far as i could find, totally made it up because i didn't want to use a real town lol 
> 
> fourthly...hope you enjoyed the newest episode. i will say nothing because i don't want to spoil. all i will say is that i sure liked it. i mean.. hahaha
> 
> anyway, i hope you are all staying safe and have a great week! x


	3. three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> soooo sorry for how long this took me. i have some other stories and swapped between which one to focus on and added to this chapter a few hundred words at a time. i really loved season 4, though i know that wasn't universal. i thought it was wonderful, i hope you guys thought the same! all the best and stay safe!! x

three

Sometimes, in the dreams, it was me lying in that bed in our old cottage while James sat on the stool alongside me. I would hack and writhe and spasm against the sheets from a fever that never left me. Behind him, blurred shapes would pass between the rooms in the shapes of my mother and father and even Lynch. Lynch would come closest to the bed and shimmer into something more solid, putting his hand on my brother's shoulder.

Lynch had blood rippling from his throat and hard dark lines of it would spill out if he swallowed. It would ripple along his arms, stain the white shirt that my brother wore and touch the straw and hay scattered along the floor. He would open his mouth to speak and only birdsong would come out, not words, not something that I could understand.

And my brother would say, “She’s not much longer for this world, like this, if we don’t do somethin’ for her.”

Birdsong would follow from Lynch.

“No,” James would always answer. “Not much longer at all, is she.”

***************************************************************

Dawn came through the curtains and turned the colour of the world to peach-fuzz. I awoke tired and drowsy and slouched to the bathroom, pulling at that latch that Rabbi had bolted against the door, hearing it swing behind me. In the bathroom, I washed and dressed myself in one of the shapeless, powder-blue dresses that Maxia had left for me, their hemlines brushing beneath my knees.

I heard the goldfinches stirring in their nests, whistling their morning songs into the chill that fogged across the rooftops of the houses in the neighbourhood, a fog that I could spot if I stood on my tippy-toes and peered out the window. I finished smoothing down my short hair that curled at my jawline and then patted down the creases that had bunched my skirt.

I swung open the bathroom door and startled myself because Rabbi was already standing in front of it, one hand raised as if he had been about to knock. He looked sheepish and awkward all over again, lowering his hand.

But he had no coat around him into which he could sink and hide himself from me. He stood on the landing in beige trousers and a black jumper tucked into his waistline, his suspenders casually dropped at either hip. It was such a foreign sight that I was reminded once again of how little I truly knew about him.

I watched his eyes drift behind me to that window clouded in fog from both the heat of my bathwater draining and from the fog of the morning.

“I should have asked you first,” I said. “If you had wanted the bathroom, I mean – I figured you were still asleep, hadn’t heard you in your room.”

Rabbi shifted. “No. Weren’t lookin’ to take the bathroom. I was lookin’ for you, if you want breakfast. Plates are taken up before nine, usually. So, if you don’t eat now, won’t be nothin’ ‘til lunch.”

I felt the tension drop from my shoulders. “Oh,” I mumbled. “Sure. I’ll come eat with you.”

He surprised me again, stepping sideways into the threshold of his room to let me walk downstairs ahead of him, though he was never far behind. The house was silent again, muffled and stuffy. There were the inky silhouettes of Italians through the frosted glass around the front door, still sitting on their porch, watching cars crawl through the neighbourhood.

Other men wandered the garden, passing the windows in the kitchen and bundling their hands into the pockets of their coats against the cold. In an hour, they would slip off into their cars and other men would emerge from between the trees to replace them until night came black and unforgiving and those men, too, would be replaced.

Rabbi brought two bowls of cereal to the table and poured orange juice for us both. He chose the chair that was turned to the hall, so that he could watch those who passed in the hall even if it seemed that it was only us in this house, alone.

For a moment, I imagined that we owned it and the idea thrilled me; two poor souls like us turning the tide and having enough to fill a house like this with all sorts of little trinkets that cost more than most people made annually. What thrilled me about it, really? I was not sure. Somehow, though, it made the cereal taste sweeter and the milk fresher.

“Heard you talkin’ in your sleep.”

Redness spotted my cheeks when I looked at Rabbi. “What?”

“Heard you talkin’ in your sleep.” He cleared his throat. “Didn’t mean to. Don’t sleep much me-self, you see.”

“Bad dreams,” I told him. “Sorry if I disturbed you.”

“Didn’t mean it that way. Just meant – I heard you, is all.”

“Good thing it’s just us up there, then.” I smiled and stirred my spoon through shreds of soggy cereal. “Is that why you don’t sleep either? Dreams as bad as mine?”

Passing shadows on the porch distracted him. Through the long length of the hall, we could still see the front door with all those frosted windows and whenever the liquid shapes moved, he watched them.

When they settled, he swallowed another mouthful of his cereal and shrugged his shoulders.

“Do a lot of thinkin’,” he said. “Can’t seem to stop me-self even at night from doin’ all that thinkin’.”

“What do you think about?”

Again, his shoulders rose and fell. “Nothin’ important.”

“Important enough, if it stops you sleepin’.”

Those shadows moved; his eyes followed. His throat bobbed and his spoon lay still against the porcelain of his bowl.

“Saturday I’m supposed to take you to the local store,” he said quietly. “Supposed to drive you there and back.”

“Mrs Fadda told me,” I replied. “Didn’t know it was you takin’ me.”

He was silent and so I glanced at him, noticing his distraction. Slowly my own eyes roamed toward those shadows that wavered and grew strong behind the frosted glass, deep pools of black the closer that those men came and the handle of the front door dipped downward – then, softly, it was released and the men returned to the table because something had distracted them and Rabbi swallowed without ever having taken another bite.

He looked at me, _really_ looked at me. I felt something had passed, then, something that I had not fully understood. He seemed more comfortable in the house without those other men around, watching him, watching me.

“I usually take a drive out of town on Saturdays,” he said. “D’you want to join me?”

“Did you ask the German girl to join you on drives?”

I had wanted to say it teasingly yet it came out tinged in worry, because I felt he was hinting at something, that it would be much better for me away from the house than inside of it where he might not be around.

“No,” he answered. “But I should have.”

Another thing about him that showed his Irish heart even if he himself wanted to pull it out and toss it aside – he spoke in riddles and hints and never said what he meant directly, only ever alluding, suggesting, _warning_.

Always I felt that Rabbi was warning me of something that he could not say and sometimes I wondered if birdsong would come from his mouth like it did from Lynch in my dreams.

I held his stare and nodded shortly. “I’ll go with you.”

Once we had finished, I collected the bowls and plates and dipped them in warm sudsy water in a basin, washing while Rabbi sat at the table, slouched low and looking into the garden. I was not sure what he did during the day or if he would stay in the house. He would sometimes glance at the porch and his brows would dip low together in thought, his lips pursed as if he was chewing on something, something gritty and tough.

I had finished with each plate and glass and wiped my hands on a cloth nearby. I found the apron that Maxia had told me about in the pantry. It was not fully necessary but something told me that Maxia liked the pageantry of it all.

I tied it around myself, fiddling with the strings.

“American goldfinches, you said.”

I glanced up at him. “What?”

Rabbi cleared his throat. “The birds,” he explained. “Yesterday. You said it was American goldfinches singing out there.”

“Yes.” I felt a pinkness on my cheeks, worried that he thought it was silly to pay attention to things like birdsong. “You can tell them apart if you listen closely. But most folk never listen to them."

Rabbi reached for his hat and fastened it on his dark hair. “You’ll eat with Zero at lunch,” he said.

“And you?”

He stilled. “What d’you mean?”

The pinkness worsened. “What will you eat, I mean? Will you not be here for lunch with us?”

“No,” he said. “Should be back in the afternoon. Got some stuff to do, is all. Remember what I told you, Ava.”

I nodded. “Keep to myself. I remember.”

He moved for the hallway, with its shadowy depths seeping from its angled ceiling and heavily-curtained windows. The other men in the garden shifted position, like clockwork, rounding the grass with their guns glittering from their waistbands. I was not sure if Rabbi carried anything like that, for his coat hung loose and ill-fitted around his angular frame.

I watched him, though, struck by how kind he had been. I had been placed in his care, that much was true, but I doubted that Don Fadda had asked for so much. That was Rabbi himself, I could tell, his own gentleness peeking through.

“Be safe, Rabbi,” I called softly to him.

He paused in the hall, halfway to its end, where the shadows blackened most of all, right before the door. He had heard me, of that much I was certain. He nodded stiffly, turning his head but never quite looking at me. There was a light mist out, then, a faint sprinkling of whitish droplets dripping from the overhang of the porch. It splattered the windowsill, left a light rhythm. That was all the sound in the world, for even the goldfinches had paused their tune, until Rabbi put one foot in front of the other and the Earth turned, the birdsong continued.

He was gone.

*****

Thursday was bridge-day. Mrs Fadda would have all her girlfriends around, whose names were rattled off for me by Maxia. I had tried to memorise them – Antonia, Cecilia, Carmella, Rosa. Once she had finished, she left me in the living-room to roll up the rich, heavy rugs that Mrs Fadda told me had been brought from the Boot. Their frayed edges held that scent of oldness, of times past. It was spice and must.

I hauled them out onto the front porch to batter them free of dust like Maxia had told me. She had said that I could play the radio if I liked, but I preferred hearing the footsteps all around and knowing who passed through the hall.

The house had strange, sullen moods, much like those Rabbi had said plagued Mrs Fadda. But it also had lighter moments, when sunlight seemed to find the house between the picket fences lined outside, and it filled with a yellowish warmth that softened the sharp lines of furniture and gaudy frames around portraits of bleeding saints.

“Who the Hell are you?”

I had been crouched on the ground, rolling another rug in front of me. It unfurled, bumping dully against my legs as I stood and spun around to face a man. He was short and seemingly hungover, a lipstick stain on the curl of his off-white collar. He looked at me, his eyes bleary. He stood beneath the archway that led into the living-room.

“Josto!”

Maxia came from the kitchen and hugged the man, pecking his cheeks, which she then cupped between her hands. Her attitude shifted and she cursed at him in Italian, pinching his collar.

Then she looked at me and said, “Oh, Ava, this is my brother – Josto, this is the Irish girl.”

Josto waved a hand vaguely in my direction. “Right, right. Listen, Eva –…”

“Ava,” Maxia cut in.

Her smile was wide and strained. She had argued with Antoon on the back porch an hour after Rabbi had left. I had pretended not to hear it. Even without a lick of Italian, I could tell she had called him some choice words because he pushed around her and had not been back since. She had cried in the bedroom, but had since powdered her skin, so no-one could tell but me.

“Ava,” Josto echoed. “You know how to make some damned coffee?”

“Mama has bridge,” Maxia said. 

Somehow, those three words were enough to silence Josto, who slunk toward the kitchen, grumbling to himself. He seemed not to appreciate his sister fawning over him and appreciated her scolding even less.

But he had sure surprised me. I had imagined the son of Don Fadda to be – well, _different_. He had spent his night in the arms of a lover and with a bottle of whiskey tipped to his lips too, evidently, and it had done him no favours, for he looked pale and irritable. Perhaps I had thought he would resemble his father, refined, a man of power.

"Ava?" Maxia called from the kitchen, leaning out from the arch to look at me. "Mama should be down soon."

I nodded. I had been told to clean the bedrooms but her mother's had been off-limits that morning. I had glimpsed it through the opening and closing of the door as Maxia had come out into the hall to speak with me. The curtains had been drawn and I had seen the lump of Mrs Fadda beneath her blankets, turned away from the door, drawn inward on herself. She had slipped into a black mood, one that meant it would be a struggle to rouse her for a game of bridge with her girlfriends. 

“Mama is very tired,” Maxia had said. “She had to lie down for a while. Needs her rest, you know.”

I had nodded then, too, like I nodded most of the time that Maxia spoke. It was none of my business, whether Mrs Fadda made it to bridge or not. It was only my business to let the rugs breathe on the porch, bring them in if there was even a hint of rain, rid them of dust and return them to the floorboards after I had polished them. I would keep my head down, I would stay to myself, like I had been advised. It had been working out well so far. Maxia rushed off after Josto and I heard them squabble in the kitchen before he came storming out with a mug of coffee, which he accidentally slopped onto his shirt.

He yelped and let out a loud stream of curses, patting at the stain, which only worsened it. In a sudden fit of rage, he tore off the shirt, standing in his vest at the bottom of the stairs. He threw the shirt toward me, where it landed on a floor a few feet away.

“Forget the fucking rugs,” he spat. “Find me a clean goddamn shirt.”

Maxia came rushing into the hall, her heels clicking. She looked between us, then the shirt, then back at her brother. He marched upstairs and she quickly followed after him, calling his name. The argument continued upstairs for a few more seconds before his door slammed, a loud sound which ricocheted through the house. I stood, motionless, somewhat stunned. Maxia clopped downstairs again, dropping heavily at the bottom step where she looked at me and tried another weak, strained smile.

“His shirts should be in the laundry-room.”

She walked off into the kitchen, her eyes brimming with tears all over again.

*****

Zero had lessons with a tutor in the afternoon but came to eat lunch with me beforehand. He had to climb up onto the stool at the island in the kitchen, his shorts pulling up as he did so. He was quiet and polite and thanked me for the sandwiches with a nod of his head. He ate in chunks, tearing the bread and licking at the peanut-butter and jelly. I sat with him and ate peanut-butter sandwiches too, because I had not prepared anything else and I was afraid to be found rummaging in the cupboards too intensely, as if I was trying to steal. I had known maids fired for less than that.

Besides, Josto confused me and I did not want to fall on his bad side, which seemed so far to be his _only_ side. I had brought him a shirt, like he asked, but he had snatched it from me without a word and whipped his door shut before I could even see him properly.

I preferred Zero.

“What lessons do you have?” I asked him.

He cocked his head, seemingly thinking about it. “English first,” he said. “Then math. I hate math. My tutor makes me take a test every Friday.”

“Wasn’t my favourite subject either.”

“Papa says it’s important.” He had a smudge of peanut-butter on his chin and I found a napkin to wipe it away for him. “He says everyone needs math.”

“He would be right about that.”

“What happened to Helga?”

I folded the napkin. “The German girl? I think she had to go home.”

Zero stared at the other half of his sandwich, still on his plate. “Oh,” he said. “Will you go home?”

“I would like to stay here. Would you like that?”

The boy considered me, his brow scrunched. It was quite funny, though I tried not to smile. He pursed his lips and then nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “I think so. But I’ll miss Helga. She used to give me an extra peanut-butter and jelly sandwich. They’re my favourite.”

His eyes slid toward me, not looking _at_ me but hoping to determine if I would fall for his little ruse. I snorted, sliding off my stool. 

“I think we can arrange that,” I told him lightly. He perked up and I added, “If you get good results on that math test tomorrow, that is. _Then_ we might be able to swing an extra peanut-butter and jelly sandwich. How does that sound?”

“Deal.”

He stuck out his small hand and I could finally laugh, shaking it. It seemed one brother took after his father more than the other.

*****

The cleaning of Don Fadda’s office came in the later part of the afternoon. The ladies would soon arrive for bridge and Maxia had asked that I bring them refreshments after I finished with her father's office. I suspected this was more to demonstrate to the older women that the German girl had been done away with and thus there was no more need for idle gossip between them about what had happened in the Fadda house.

I had also heard Maxia pleading with her mother to get out of bed and dress for the occasion. I had simply continued with my duties, bringing the duster and sweeping brush to the office. I thought Maxia would take offense if I tried to offer help.

Don Fadda sat in his chair, eating peanuts. It was also a funny sight and I was in a light mood from having spent time with Zero. I had become fond of him rather quickly. He appeared shy and reserved but there was a boldness to him underneath it all, though he clamped up if anybody else passed through the kitchen or tried to talk to him.

He did not appear to be too interested in anything but his toys and a book he had been reading about a cowboy in the Wild West. This was what had made him like horses and gunfights, but he had nobody with whom he could play. I resolved to find some time during the day to play with him, because there were no other children around and it was a shame that he spent so much time alone in his room.

“Ava,” Don Fadda said, “come, sit.”

I stilled, looking at him in surprise. I had been dusting the figurines he kept and immediately worried that I had done something wrong. I took the armchair in front of his desk, the one where I had sat the first time I had met him, my hands clasped and twisting around each other like warring snakes.

“Is everything all right, Don Fadda?”

“Oh, I think so. Sun is shining, house is quiet.” He reached out for the bowl of peanuts and tilted them toward me. “Do you want some of these?”

“No, thank you. I ate earlier – with your son.”

“Zero,” he nodded. “Good boy. Clever. You met my other boy also?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Josto is a hot-head. Acts too quickly,” he muttered. “But he has a good heart. He knows the business, knows what he wants. Do you know what you want?”

The question hung between us. “I’m not sure, sir.”

He shrugged. “Normal. Me, I always knew what I wanted. But not always how to get it. This, you learn with time.”

The room was stuffy and warm. He would not allow me to open the windows, would not allow the curtains to be drawn apart too much. He seemed to like this office for its secluded nature, tucked at the back of the house, furthest from the bedrooms and noise of his children arguing, of his wife prone in bed, awake but somehow not aware of it. There was only the brittle crack of peanut-shells broken in his hands for sound, They clinked against the bowl each time.

“I thought you should take a rest,” he said. “Long day for you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Is Rabbi helping you?”

“Yes,” I said. “He’s been very kind.”

Don Fadda hummed. “Another smart one, Rabbi. He will not guide you wrong.”

There was a tap at the door. Calamita appeared. I had learned his name through hearing it spoken by the other men, even though he had been in the room that first day when I was hired. He had a strangeness to him, an ability to slither into place and make himself known in his sly manner. His eyes ghosted over me and focused on his boss, who continued eating as if there had been no interruption.

Calamita spoke in a soft tone, his words hidden from me in a shroud of Italian. Don Fadda, like Josto had done earlier, waved his hand dismissively and Calamita slid back into the hall, shutting the door behind him.

“Meetings,” Don Fadda grunted. “Endless meetings. You can finish, Ava. Go to your room, do what you like.”

“There is a bridge game, sir.”

His eyebrows rose. “Tonight? Ah. You are right. After that, you finish.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

I grabbed the duster and brush. His office had only been half-cleaned yet he seemed not to mind. If anything, I thought he liked the comfort of this momentary solitude, in which he could sit alone for just a moment. But a large man, led by a gaggle of other men with guns in their waistbands and gifts in their hands, walked past me, tipping their hats at me before breaking into his silent world.

I heard the clink of glasses, the familiar chafing of a hefty envelope pulled from one pocket and passed to another. I had not been here long. Already, though, the sounds of the house had become as familiar to me as birdsong. 

*****

Mrs Fadda came to bridge wearing a pale yellow dress that hollowed her out. She was pale and tired. She drank one shot of whiskey and then went into the room where her girlfriends waited. I stood in the hall and followed with a tray of drinks for them. I had to stand there for most of that game, refilling glasses, nodding and telling them that I was the Irish girl they had heard about, that it was Ava, not Eva or Amy or anything else. I told them that America was wonderful, yes; no, I had not seen Italy; yes, it probably was a much more beautiful country; yes, of course America had its charms too; no, I could not speak much Italian but I would be glad to learn.

This was what led to those older women sitting me down between them, teaching me their words, glad that one person listened to them when it seemed they came from houses much like this one, where the women went into one room and men into another and their children had grown, now had babies of their own, did not care for stories of the old country, did not care for tradition and honour, not like in their days.

“I like her more than the Dutch one,” Antonia said.

Mrs Fadda had sunken in her chair, one hand raised to cradle her forehead. Her hand was veiny and the blueness stood out.

“German,” Cecilia said. “The girl was German.”

“If a man starts calling you _tesoro_ , you run,” Carmella told me, placing a cool frail hand on my wrist.

“And run faster if he starts with _puttana_ ,” Rosa added.

That brought a round of cackling laughter from the women. Despite their jokes, I had learned little phrases, small dashes into the language that made me feel that little bit better. Soon I was dismissed, for Maxia had swept into the room and wanted to play host.

It was not hard to tell that she had chosen the best time, because most of the women were readying themselves to pull on their fur coats and shuffle off out to the cars which idled outside for them, surrounded by men from other families who probably loathed being sent out for such benign tasks.

*****

Slubbing upstairs to my room, I noticed the light was on in the hall again. I looked right, into the bedroom that Rabbi had been given long before I had ever gotten here. He had bunk-beds and I wondered if there had once been another boy with him, though he was now a man and it seemed too small a frame for him.

But there he sat, on his own, nearest the window, in a chair too small for him also. He was looking out the sheer curtains. He was not aware of me for quite some time, until I tapped against his door. Twice, I tapped.

“Are you all right, Rabbi?”

He did not turn around. “I’m listenin’,” he said.

“To what?”

“The birds,” he answered. “Don’t hear a difference between ‘em.”

I felt a warmth in my chest, moving into the room and drawing a chair alongside him. His room was airy and light, not like the morose patterns of mahogany and sepia which suffocated the other rooms. I plopped myself beside him and drew my chair close to his, leaning forward to open the gap in his window a little wider.

“The goldfinch sings while it flies and that sound is shorter. Like a titter.” Though it stirred that pinkness in my cheeks again, I whistled three sharp notes for him. “A little like that. Then, they sometimes sit and make a longer whistle sound. But they make sounds for their mates, too. When the male looks for a female, he will change the tune, try to make it sound like a lot of sounds at once to impress her. Even takes notes from other birds, just to show off. Most of the time, though, it sounds like that little titter.”

“Never pay them any mind,” he told me. “Birds and the like. Where’d you learn it?”

“My father. Liked to listen to them all the time, he did. Said they told you things that man can’t. Even when they’re not singin’. Especially then, ‘cause they’re tellin’ you to watch for somethin’, to notice what they’ve already seen.”

Rabbi was quiet. He came down from perches and yellow-coloured feathers long enough to say, “You met Josto.”

“How'd you know?”

“Maxia told me.” His voice cracked, once again sounding sore. “Said he was in foul humour. He’ll settle soon, though. Josto always blows a gasket and then settles.”

“I would take peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches with Zero over a moment with Josto any day.”

I realised that Rabbi had taken off his heavy coat and draped it on his bed. His sleeves were rolled to his elbows, his hat left on his bedside table, alongside a Bible. He had told me that he did not believe in anything. There was no gun poking from his waistband. I did not know what to make of that. His arms were sinewy, shy of sunlight. It felt strange to sit in his room with him, perhaps too familiar, too personal. He might have been too polite to tell me, so I stood from the chair.

“I’ll let you be,” I said.

Rabbi whistled; three sharp notes, just like that. He had mimicked the sound I made earlier, only on hearing it once and once alone. Then he stood, sweeping the windows shut, cutting it off before they could respond to his call.

***************************************************************

Saturday split between the houses in rays of warm, delicate sunshine that bathed our rooms on the third floor in golden light. I dressed myself in a white dress which, though simple and cheap, felt much lighter and prettier than that blue dress with its apron. I had been glad to slip out from the house. I pretended to walk some streets away, because Rabbi had thought it better not to leave together.

He had not explained more than that, but Calamita had been sitting on the porch and I felt him – felt more than just his stare, felt him like a shadow which loomed between the shifting of the trees, dipping down like drooping branches to bristle my shoulders and remind me that he was there.

Rabbi waited on another street, leaning against his maroon-coloured car. He opened the door for me and then slid into his own side. I felt the cool air drawn through the gaps of his rolled-down windows, brushing at my wrists, the hollow of my jaw, whipping stray strands of hair from my braid.

I had never imagined myself in a car like that, again, never imagined myself away from endless toil and labour in my own country, never imagined the American houses with flags and fences. There was toil here, there was labour aplenty, but there was something sweeter in the air. At least there had been, then, with Rabbi and the streets rolling past, their trees shimmering leaves down upon us.

I slipped my hand through the gap and turned my palm against the wind and thought it was a beautiful thing, to be here, to be temporarily American; for if I closed my eyes, I could pretend like I had that morning that house back there, so large and stately, was ours, its lawn and cars too, and these were our neighbours, our town all around us, until all the world seemed ours too.

*****

The road turned bumpy and rose in hilly mounds, arching, dipping, arching again. The horizon bubbled thickly on the asphalt. The landmarks were telephone wires and the occasional gas station dotted in-between the long stretches of fields and nothingness, with a house dropped onto some flat plot of yellowed grass.

I leaned my head back against the seat and eyed Rabbi, who was hunched forward around the wheel, eyes fixated on some fuzzing dot up ahead. “Why did you offer to bring me?”

He licked his lips. “Thought it would be nice for you. D’you regret comin'?”

“No. Just wonderin’.”

“What else would you be doin’ on your day off?”

I smiled, shrugging my shoulders. “Eatin’ peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches, I suppose.”

“Have those in Liberal too, they do.” He angled his head to look at me. “If you’re hungry.”

I studied him closely, though he had turned back to the road. Was he truly this kind or had Don Fadda asked him to occupy me outside of work hours? Afraid that I might hear or see too much in that house, where men often whispered to one another, where I spotted their knuckles bleeding and torn, their lips cut, though never were such wounds brought up. Only a promise that business was good, in Kansas City. It was booming.

“I could eat,” I said.

*****

The restaurant that we had chosen was on a corner and we got a booth that looked out into the street. I ate apple-pie and he drank coffee, his eyes skimming the faces around us. I watched the waitresses in their checked aprons, their bonnets, their soft shoes which scuffed against the tiles. I thought of Don Fadda and what he had said, in the cocoon of his office, sealed off from the house and the old country and the world, when he had asked me what I wanted.

“Would you wait here for me a minute?” he asked.

I was confused but nodded. “Sure.”

Rabbi stood, sticking his hat atop his head and stepping out into the street. I watched him weave between passing cars, to the feed-store, where he went inside for a couple of moments and emerged a while later, without a bag or anything else in his hands. He returned to the booth and finished his coffee. He was antsy and smoothed down the pockets of his coat.

“You been to the movie theatre yet?” he asked.

“No,” I answered.

“Would you like to go?”

*****

The film was projected on a screen so large that I thought I could reach out and touch the actress. _Bette Davis_ , he told me. _And Anne Baxter_. _I forget the others_. He sank low in his seat and the lights flickered against his face, drawing out the shadows beneath his eyes, hollowing his cheeks, but brightening that thoughtfulness there in his stare, that furrow in his brow. He was handsome, I decided. He was very handsome.

I never would have sat in a theatre with another man like that, would have feared what was thought of me for such a casual way of acting around him. But it was different here. I was no actress, no movie-star on a screen. I was simply watching a story play itself out and thinking it must be wonderful to stand up there like those other women and mouth words and summon tears for the sadder scenes and I leaned low in the seat like he did, revelling in the freeness of it all.

*****

The car was warm and cosy. He had given me his scarf. It had been a gesture brought on by the chill of the evening, for we had spent a long time in Liberal. I would find an excuse for where I had been but he would not be asked, he said. He often left and returned and left again. He was only wanted if Don Fadda asked for him. I listened to him while we rattled along the old roads with potholes and puddles and great spots of blank nothingness, though I felt I recognised the knots in the telephone wires and the tufts of yellowed grass a little more than I had when we had left earlier.

“Thank you, Rabbi,” I said.

He glanced at me. “For what? Only a movie.”

“Never seen one before,” I told him. “Not on a screen that big neither. I liked it. I liked Annie Baxter.”

“Anne,” he corrected.

“She’s beautiful. What a life they must have.”

“What a life,” he repeated.

He said that we could do it again next Saturday. The clouds spun purple and red and I dozed, dreaming of flags fluttering in a light breeze. I had no night-terrors, then, in that car.

*****

I locked the latch on my door twice. Only then would he move away from his door and lay down in his own bed while I lay in mine.

*****

In the morning, he was listening to the birds again. I saw him through our open doors, saw his silhouette etched against the pinkish tone of dawn. This time, I thought he understood what my father had talked about, for there was no tightness in his shoulders, no tension in his hands. He listened and saw those yellow-feathered creatures flitting between the trees like he never had before.

*****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i was worried about making rabbi overly nice but on a rewatch he's pretty kind to satchel off the bat and hey i love soft rabbi so teehehehe

**Author's Note:**

> i've been debating whether to post for ages. it's hard to tell if rabbi is kind only to satchel therefore he talks or does he talk at all hahah it seems around the faddas not so much. anyway i hope you guys enjoyed it. all the best and stay safe! x


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